In August, over five hundred people were arrested at demonstrations opposing the British government’s recent decision to list direct-action group Palestine Action as a “terrorist organization.” Peaceful protesters mostly aged in their sixties and seventies were dragged away from the square in front of the Houses of Parliament for the alleged crime of holding placards expressing support for the organization, which was banned even despite its nonviolent tactics.

These unprecedented arrests have been called a “gross abuse of state power,” as participants highlight the overreach through which counterterrorism laws purportedly intended to protect British citizens are instead used to intimidate and jail them. But the arrests are just how imperialist state power is supposed to operate. “People are shocked [by the arrests], but it’s exactly how the law is meant to be used,” a spokesperson for campaign group Defend Our Juries (DOJ), which organized the protests, told Jacobin.

The Palestine Action arrests are just part of a broader strategy. Political diaspora communities and left-wing political movements in the UK face criminalization under what Amnesty International has called one of the world’s toughest anti-terrorism regimes, often due to influence by authoritarian foreign powers. For example, the UK’s highly criminalized Kurdish community experiences repeated detention and interrogation without the right to silence, terror sentences for holding Kurdish flags, and a recent raid on the London Kurdish Community Centre that culminated in the arrest of six community organizers on similarly trumped-up terrorism charges.